John Edgar Wideman Quotes

Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African.

I am so used to having two faces. A face that I had for black America and a face for white America. When Obama became president, I lost both faces. Now I only have one face.

As a black member of parliament and minister for nearly a decade, I was determined not to be defined by my race. I didn't want to be 'the black politician', when being black is just a part of who I am.

Well who's black and what is a black person?

I never though much about race.

We also thought of ourselves in racial and largely ethnic terms.

I am Charles Mingus. Half-black man. Yellow man. Half-yellow. Not even yellow, nor white enough to pass for nothing but black and not too light enough to be called white.

Since I got to this country when I was 12, I've been obsessed with this idea of whiteness and blackness because I realized I was neither. For me, it was so important to me to make a film that focused on whiteness because you wouldn't have blackness if you didn't have whiteness.

Race, to me, is a very blurry thing.

There was a time I was no longer going to be black. I was going to be an 'intellectual.' When I was first looking around for colleges, thinking of colleges I couldn't afford to go to, I was thinking of being a philosopher. I began to understand then that much of my feelings about race were negative.

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

Race is everything.

What after all am I. Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates black and white in America.

This problem, which exists because of the presence of … Negroes in this country, can be permanently solved only by the physical separation of the races or by resigning ourselves to total mongrelization resulting in the destruction of both the white and black races

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

I write about race in America in hopes of undermining the notion of race in America.

White identity politics has permeated our rhetoric.

I am black, and there's no getting around that, but being black doesn't define every aspect of my life.

When I come out of the box, I don't come out of the box as racial.

I'm black, and I'm human. I'm a woman, and I'm human. I believe in God, and I am human.

I'm fully conscious all the time that I'm an American Negro, because it's part of my life. But I also know that if I want to say, 'I see a bus full of people,' I don't have to say, 'I am a Negro seeing a bus full of people.'

Our vulnerability is that both blacks and whites can use our impossible racial authenticity against us. Both races can throw up our mixed background to challenge our authority to speak.

I think the word 'diverse' is a cancerous word because it's life. It's a PC way of saying 'non-white,' and it ultimately suggests that white is the standard.

I am whatever you want me to be and I can't control that. My experience is my experience, but I can't really claim anything. I know when I take my wig off at night and I have to twist my hair up, I'm black. But I don't get too personal most of the time.

I definitely am not white.